We were sitting a month or so ago in the early evening in the rooftop café on one of my favourite buildings in Florence, Brunelleschi’s sublime Ospedale degli Innocenti, when a sensational live performance built up before our eyes.
It was what we learned to call a murmuration of starlings, as thousands, if not tens of thousands, of those birds swirled and whirled above us, in apparently random patterns (flying fast, yet no one bird crashed into another). From time to time some of them settled, on TV aerials and telephone lines as well as on ancient balustrades and pediments, before starting another display of synchronized virtuosity.
The birds overnight in the hinterlands to the west of Florence, before returning each day to search for food, mainly insects I presume, above the city streets. This was the evening roll-call before the commute to the suburbs.
It’s a twice-daily performance: they muster out-of-town in the mornings, too, and we often see them billowing above the autostrada between Prato and Pistoia, some 20 miles from Florence, when we drive to the Watermill.
Mathematicians will tell you that the starlings don’t bump into each other because there is no overall control of the group, but rather a simple formula, with which their bird brains can cope, that keeps each one the correct distance from his/her neighbours. Literary pedagogues will tell you that the correct collective description is a murmuration of starlings. I think that’s rather pretentious (although I like a pandemonium of parrots and a parliament of rooks). I’d rather put the mathematicians and the literary scholars to one side and simply say: “Wow!”
***Coming soon to a place near you: another of nature’s stunning performances a scream of swifts, traditionally due in Rome on St Benedict’s Day, 21 March.